How Jon M. Chu Broke the ‘Wicked’ Curse (2024)

“Wicked” is an undeniable smash.

In its opening weekend, it scored $112.5 million, enough to make it the third biggest opening of 2024 and the best-non sequel opening of the year. (The two movies that opened bigger were, of course, “Inside Out 2” and “Deadpool & Wolverine.”) It was also the biggest opening for a movie based on a Broadway musical. Just a couple of days ago, it posted the biggest Monday ever in November, making more than $15.8 million. People clearly love this movie.

But a “Wicked” movie being a smash hit was far from a sure thing. For many years it seemed like the project may not ever actually happen.

Universal acquired the rights to “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” by American novelist Gregory Maguire shortly after it was published in 1995. And in 2003 they opened the Broadway musical, eventually becoming the second most successful Broadway music ever (after Disney’s “The Lion King”).

By 2011, a feature version of the musical was being planned. Directors like J.J. Abrams, Rob Marshall and James Mangold were bandied about as potentially steering the project. In 2016, a release date of December 20, 2019 was announced with “Billie Elliot” director Stephen Daldry onboard, but by 2018 it had been sidelined again. Universal gave their nightmarish “Cats” adaptation the release date once earmarked for “Wicked.”

“I came in first,” Jon M. Chu, the filmmaker who would ultimately direct “Wicked,” told TheWrap. “I was like, Oh, they’ve have so many release dates for this movie and they haven’t made it, something’s wrong. I emailed my agents, like, when are they making the movie? They have a director? I didn’t know. It’s taken a long time. I knew how to make this movie and so when I did get the call out of the blue, I was jumping around, like, did somebody drop the ball? Nobody’s chasing it, they’re coming to me directly. I didn’t have to pitch for it, but I knew from the beginning exactly what to do with it.”

Chu had seen the show on Broadway and came equipped with a plan – first he knew that the movie had to be split into two parts. He didn’t want to give himself a backdoor to potentially make a follow-up. He knew that he had to film them together and make each half as “emotionally satisfying as possible.”

Then he went deep, getting on endless Zoom calls with Winnie Holzman, who wrote the book for “Wicked” and co-wrote the movie; songwriter Stephen Schwartz; and producer Marc Platt.

“We walked through every line of every script that had ever been made for it, telling me all the stories of why this scene got cut, why this thing got put and why those words were ever written in the first place,” Chu said. “And I just downloaded. I would ask questions to poke holes in certain areas that I would come back to. But it was really about absorption, just to catch up for those 20 years.”

Chu quickly identified hang-ups that maybe fumbled previous versions of the project.

“One, I think there needs to be an urgency of why this story need to be made right now. 20 years feels like a good amount of time,” Chu said. He remembered thinking of lyrics from the show – “Something has changed within me / Something’s not the same” – during lockdown. “I was like, that’s what everybody feels like, even though it was written in 2000,” Chu said. The stage show has been read as a response to 9/11 and the hunt for an identifiable villain in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

“Those were uncertain times, and we’re in the deepest uncertain times right now, when the storyteller has been unveiled, and we’re questioning everything,” Chu said.

This led the team to questions: What does a hero look like? Why? Who said a hero should look like that? What does a villain look like? “All those things that came up felt so urgent to be told in this story and wrapped inside the American fairy tale. The American fairy tale, not just in literary but in cinema and so to do that, and in the American genre of musicals, there’s a piece of art that you could really get in there and re-examine from the inside out,” said Chu. “And that, to me, was the urgent part of it. You guys need to make this now. This is not a wait and see. This is, I’m here, and I had just done a musical and I understand how to do this, and I grew up as a fan, so I know where to protect and let’s go.”

The original “Wizard of Oz” had a profound effect on Chu. His parents were immigrants who came to America and he viewed the movie as “the American Dream story.” “My mom would talk about seeing the wizard one day,” Chu said. He was eager to “re-examine” the iconography of the original classic – “is the yellow brick road something that we should all be walking on? Does the Wizard exist to give you your heart’s desire? Is happiness the ultimate goal? Or is that a moment of change?” – and he found himself asking questions of his role as a filmmaker. “How far will you go to entertain and keep people busy, when you actually do the hard thing?” Chu said. “That was part of the appeal, was to investigate that.”

Chu whipped up a slew of other influences into “Wicked,” from the 1980s John Hughes feeling of the magical Shiz University to the classic Hollywood imagery of a train belching steam to the flying monkeys, which Chu described as Universal Monster adjacent, to the idea of walking into a high-tech city like Oz. Just the idea of traveling, from the lowest part to a boat to a train to, ultimately, flight. “To me, it’s where we are in America and where we are in the world and this unknown place we’re headed,” Chu said.

Of course, mounting a production of this scale so quickly also meant that they had to cast the movie. And fast. Chu said it was an open audition process (“Nobody was on offer”) and they saw everybody. But it was very clear when the two actresses were clicking into place. Chu remembered that Cynthia Erivo, who would win the role of Elphaba, future Wicked Witch of the West, came in in a T-shirt and jeans. “The way she sang, it was so vulnerable. I felt like it was me in a dorm room dreaming about what would be like to be a filmmaker,” Chu said.

As for Ariana Grande, who would play Galinda Upland, later known as Glinda the Good Witch, Chu was less certain. “I was like, There’s no way she’s going to be able to do this. It’s too much. She had not led a movie like this,” Chu remembered. He thought she could ace the comedy. “But she’s never had this big of a palette to go for and the fine line of emotions for this, especially at the end of movie one and movie two, that is complex stuff,” Chu said. “But she came in and I felt like I was meeting Glinda for the first time in that space. She was living it. She was changing in her own life, and she was bringing that into this.”

Incredibly, they never did a chemistry read together. The first time the actresses met was at Chu’s house. They had lunch. This was during COVID, so they hadn’t met Schwartz or Holzman in person before either. Everybody was at his house. Chu was showing them designs and pre-production artwork. And Erivo and Grande finally asked, “Should we try it?” They were in Chu’s living room. Schwartz was on the piano, Chu had his kids on his lap.

“They sang for the first time,” Chu said. It was like, we got a movie.”

More than that – they had a hit.